Your 5-a-day to #FreeYourMarketing

#FreeYourMarketing is all about what you need to do now as a business owner or marketer if you want to get found in search results, be seen on the web and drive real traffic to your website. What we’re saying is that the past is past and how you might have previously carried out SEO - how you optimise your site for search engines - is completely different in today’s world.

Change how you do SEO: Your 5-a-day

So here at Loop we’re encouraging you to #FreeYourMarketing by committing to these five simple ways to change how you do SEO.

Search engines have shown that they want to roll with the changes so you need as well. Each day you should sense-check that you’re keeping to your 5-a-day.

Here’s how:

1. Get set, mindset, go

Change your mindset. SEO isn’t such a distinct discipline anymore. You may want to do some search engine optimisation but in reality you’re going to need a mix of strategy, social media, great creative, content, SEO and online PR. That’s probably going to be a change of mindset from what you’ve been advised in the past.

2. Be boundless

Just imagine how strong your brand will appear online when you have content that’s in all the right places and liked and shared across the web: presentations, videos, reports, PDFs, blogs, press releases, webinars and competitions to name a few. Search engines will love you for it, too.

3. Open up

What the internet and particularly the advent of the social web has done is given consumers the lion's share of the conversation between a brand and its audiences. Consumers will initiate searches (typing in the words they want to use), are socially empowered (through social media) and have an ever-louder voice (they will write their own reviews for example). What this means is that as consumers we're all interacting and engaging with brands in new ways. And talking to them how we want. So, as a brand, be open to this.

4. Engage

It’s pretty clear that social media offers you a way to get closer to consumers, to engage with and help them to feel closer to your brand. And what sensibly-minded business owner or marketer wouldn’t want to use any media to achieve these aims? But if you’re going to use social media you also need to engage with the culture, norms and expectations of social channels. Across the board social media is increasingly visual, but Facebook is more informal whilst LinkedIn is a professional environment. Take note, behave accordingly.

5. Empower your people

Nowadays it’s all about empowering your people to step up and become online brand ambassadors. So enable your people to use social media and share your valuable and useful brand content. A happy by-product: you will get even closer to your customers and engage with them. What’s more, social media use will also help create those all important social signals – likes, shares and comments – which search engines now consider when ranking your site.